Pakistan wins three golds, six silvers at international ICT Awards

TAIPEI: Pakistan on Monday grabbed three gold and six silver medals at Asia Pacific ICT Awards (APICTA), an international competition featuring participants from 17 countries across the Asia Pacific.

As many as 28 teams from Pakistan participated in the event that took place in Taiwan capital, said a statement issued by the The Pakistan Software Houses Association for IT & ITES (P@SHA). Pakistan finished 4th in the overall awards count, ahead of economic powerhouses Australia, Thailand, Singapore, Japan and China.

Pakistani participants received accolades from foreign judges who said even the youngest of teams had shown the caliber of work being done by the Pakistan tech sector.

As part of its efforts to bring innovation by Pakistani IT companies to the forefront, P@SHA said it took a delegation of 41 people to Taipei for the 16th annual APICTA Awards, a four day event that is deemed as the Oscars night for the Asia Pacific ICT. 

As many as 28 teams from Pakistan competed against 236 from 17 economies across the Asia Pacific and were judged by over 60 seasoned professionals.

Leading the way with the golds were a young team from NUST for their project ‘Clinical Decision Support System for Diagnosis of Movement Disorders’, another team from NUST who collaborated with CASE, AFIO and Biomisa for their Research and Development project ‘Analysis of Optical Coherence Tomography Image for CDSS’ and Wondertree, a startup from P@SHA’s Tech Incubator The Nest i/owho won in the Inclusion and Community Category.

The Silver awards were bagged by Amin Farid for his chatbot school project on Conversation Engineering and Mr. Higgins, NUST for their project Sionser, UBL Fund Managers for their financial product imPro, Trillium Information Systems for their Security product T-Eye and two startups of The Nest i/o -MandiExpressandSheops.

The regional Awards ceremony invites applications from 17 economies, including Australia, Bangladesh, Brunei Darussalam, China, Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Macau, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Nepal and Pakistan.

 The judging was done by industry veterans, tech professionals and renowned thought leaders and VCs from all across the Asia Pacific region, said the statement.